My Latest Tip for Pilots: Aviation Landing at Your Own Risk

Circumnavigating the globe tip #12

Have you ever felt that despite your greatest efforts in aviation to prevent something from happening in the cockpit it still happens anyway? You could take every precaution possible, but it is as if the Universe conspires to see things differently.

I’ve had this happen a few times on my circumnavigation of the globe. As a practice, I try to avoid high workload, and stressful situations when I’m tired from a long flight. Specifically nighttime landings into countries, and airports that I’m not familiar with after a 6-10 hour flight over the water. It happened once into Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and another time into Darwin, Australia.

On my 8 hour open ocean leg from Noumea, New Caladonia to Pago Pago, American Samoa I was intent to ensure it didn’t happen a third time. I had worked with customs to ensure they would meet me at the plane for an 8:00 a.m. departure. They were 45 minutes late. No problem, I had a buffer. A NOTAM had just gone into effect, which prevented only private (not commercial) planes from flying until 9:30. No problem! That would get me in with the time zone change just a short time after the sun had set. I would still have some light.

As I called for my clearance I had a grin on my face thinking, this time I would make it. To my surprise, I was told to wait and the tower controller would get back to me. No call back. Ten minutes later, I called again and was told to wait. No response. This happened four times and finally I was out of patience.

When I was told to ‘”wait” I responded, “negative.” I explained that these delays would have me arriving into an island airport with mountains after dark and that I needed to start now. Apparently, I was now the squeaky wheel and was granted start up.

My frustration and assertiveness would not change the fact that nothing I could do would now prevent my night landing for a third time. I could have waited and gone another day, but that NOTAM extended for weeks and the way things were happening I knew it would just happen again the next day.

So in all this there must be something that I was supposed to learn, right?

Well the answer is your next circumnavigating the globe flying tip, which became clear to me after one of the most challenging night instrument landings that evening in total darkness with a low cloud layer, mountains on two sides of the runway, gusting 20 knot winds, an uncontrolled tower and a hand off from Approach Control, which ended with the words said in an almost morbid fashion, “N997MA land at your own risk.”

The lesson is the Universe will continue to test you until you become proficient. In fact, you will need to master it. Expect a very challenging final exam.

I needed to do more work on my night instrument approaches until I got to the place where I was comfortable with them if I was going to be doing these international flights that were subject to frequent and unpredictable delays. If I could get to that place of comfort in my training where nighttime approaches weren’t stressful then the delays wouldn’t matter. In short, I always need to be 100% prepared to execute a complicated, nighttime instrument approach at the end of a flight with no excuses. Trying to avoid them with extra planning wasn’t enough.

As instrument pilots, we will continually be handed a series of events that will throw us off balance. If it takes more lessons, more study, more patience, more practice in more controlled situations then so be it. That’s what we signed up for when we got our licenses. That’s what we may be called upon to do with others in the plane. Train for worst case scenarios and hope for the best.

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